There are many examples of functional blocks or components that can provide, produce, or detect electromagnetic or electronic signals or other characteristics. The functional blocks are typically objects, microstructures, or microelements with integrated circuits built therein or thereon. These functional blocks have many applications and uses.
Functional components have also been used to make other electronic devices. One example of such use is that of a radio frequency (RF) identification tag (RFID tag) which contains a functional block or several blocks each having a necessary circuit element. Information is recorded into these blocks, which can be remotely communicated to a base station. Typically, in response to a coded RF signal received from the base station, the RFID reflects and/or modulates the incident RF carrier back to the base station thereby transferring the information.
Such RFID tags are being incorporated into many commercial items for tracking and authenticating.
Functional components have been applied to make many electronic devices, for instance, the making of microprocessors, memories, power transistors, super capacitors, displays, x-ray detector panels, solar cell arrays, memory arrays, long wavelength detector arrays, phased array antennas, RFID tags, chemical sensors, electromagnetic radiation sensors, thermal sensors, pressure sensors, or the like. The growth for the use of functional components, however, has been inhibited by the high cost of assembling the functional components into substrates and fabricating final devices or end products that incorporate the functional components.
Often the assembling of these components requires complex and multiple processes thereby causing the price of the end product to be expensive. Furthermore, the manufacturing of these components is costly under the current method because of inefficient and wasteful uses of the technologies and the materials used to make these products.
For cost and form factor considerations, many electronic devices are being constructed with ever-smaller electronic components. In particular, devices like RFID transponders, electronic displays, active antennas, sensors, computational devices, and a number of wireless devices rely on integrated circuits (ICs) as small a 1 mm on a side, with pressure to decrease the size further. While the raw component cost of devices can decrease along with their size, assembly of the components into devices becomes more difficult and more costly as their size decreases. There is a need for technologies that enable the low-cost assembly of active components that are on the order of hundreds of microns on a side, or even smaller and making interconnections to these active components.
In order to interconnect very small RFID chips with antennas to form RFID tags, straps or “interposers” or carriers with the RFID chips formed therein are used to connect the RFID chips to the antennas. The interposers or carriers typically include conductive leads or pads (also sometimes referred to as pad conductors) that are electrically coupled to contact pads of the chips. These pads provide a larger effective electrical contact area than the RFID chips and alleviate some stringent alignment requirement when the interposers are coupled to the antennas. The larger area provided by the pads reduces the accuracy required for placement of chips during manufacture while still providing effective electrical connection. Currently, methods or structures of connecting the RFID chips to antennas still involve mechanical or physical interconnection between the interposers (hence the chips) and the antennas and thus, some alignments are still required. Furthermore, it is required that the antenna assemblies and the interposer assemblies be aligned to one another (interposers' pad conductors to antenna pads) for the completion of the RFID tags.
As demand for less expensive RFID tags increases, it is desirable to develop ways to manufacture and create RFID tags that involve simple and less expensive assembly.